Leslie Iwerks

Leslie Iwerks is an Academy Award® and Emmy® nominated director and producer who currently serves as the CEO and Creative Director of Iwerks & Co., a Santa Monica based multimedia production company.

Iwerks creates critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries, features and series that celebrate the genius, risks and rewards of creative visionaries; showcase heartfelt human tales, from the depths of the Guatemalan garbage dumps to the toxic tar sands of Alberta, Canada; and that document the human story of innovation and enterprise globally. An adventure and travel enthusiast, Iwerks has filmed on all seven continents around the world.

Her body of work encompasses feature films, such as "The Pixar Story," "Citizen Hearst," "Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible," "The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story and League of Legends Origins," acclaimed environmental documentaries, including "Recycled Life," "Pipe Dreams" and "Downstream," and most recently, the in-depth docuseries, "The Imagineering Story," which debuted on Disney+ in 2019.

Iwerks’ desire to innovate and push boundaries with her filmmaking has been cultivated and inspired by her family upbringing, as her grandfather, Ub Iwerks, was the original designer and co-creator of Mickey Mouse and a multi Academy Award®-winning visual effects pioneer; her father, Don Iwerks, is also an Academy Award® winner for Technical Lifetime Achievement, and the founder of the large format film company, Iwerks Entertainment, which has built Iwerks large format theaters and projections systems in over 200 theaters around the world.

Iwerks is a graduate of the USC School of Cinema-Television and serves on the USC School of Cinematic Arts Alumni Council. She is an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Documentary Branch, the Producers Guild of America, the Television Academy, the International Documentary Association, and serves on the board of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Scientific and Technical Council and was Chair of the 2020 SciTech Public Presentations Subcommittee.